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7/30/2018 An Extraordinary Life: Lee O.

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O. Coldren 1943-2012 Crooks and Liars
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Lee in Peru, 1973

Lee Orin Coldren. Born in California May 17, 1943, died in


California July 29, 2012. Leaves sister and brother-in-law Kay
and Claude Earls, niece Karoli, nephew Lee, son Daryl,
stepchildren Malcolm, Clea and Wali Archard, beloved wife
Mary Czechan Coldren and Gridley the Greyhound behind.
Those are the facts, but not the story. Bare facts never tell the
story. They’re just the frame surrounding the picture, but the
picture always tells the story.

Some people should live forever. My uncle Lee was one of


those people. Never, ever in a million years did I imagine that
I would be writing this today, or any day. I always thought
(irrationally, of course) he would live forever. There are some
people who transcend ordinary things, like age and illness.
They stay frozen in time in one’s mind. He was one. Yet. I am
writing this post and he did not live forever and my mind
knows that but my heart does not comprehend, cannot begin
to comprehend, may never comprehend the words in the
email from my mother I opened after landing in Detroit last
week.

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…they don’t think Lee will last the weekend…

He did not. We’re all a little poorer today, there is a little bit
less light than there was on Saturday or Friday or the day
before because he is gone. I still can’t wrap my head around
that reality, so I write. About who he was, what he did, why it
matters, not just to me, but to you.

Little memories
My earliest memory: Lee as my mother’s
mischievous little brother, leaving his
tropical fish tank for her to fishsit. There
was nowhere to put it but my little
bedroom and the tank was a stinky thing. Lee and I,
Vague recollections of formaldehyde- 1963
preserved octopi in jars in my
grandmother’s garage. His collection of
vintage 7-Up bottles stored away that I helped him find back
in the days where recycling meant re-using. We’d pick
through the bottles in the market and find the old ones.

He loved old things. Things with a history and a past. Things


that weren’t disposable, or easily forgotten. Rugs, jewelry,
silverware. Solid, material, lasting things.

There was Lee coming home from college at Cal and poking
my mother in the side to make her squeal before laughing in
his delightful deep baritone melodic voice.

Always: 7-Up and Rocky Road ice cream. We never had those
things unless Lee came home. Then it was a feast of soda and
ice cream and fun. Even now, Rocky Road evokes memories of
Lee, returning home from school to picnics, celebrations, and
lots of Rocky Road.

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If you search the Internet, you’ll find him. He wasn’t your


average uncle, which was what made him magical and
extraordinary. Here’s the best bio I’ve found, probably one he
wrote himself, from the Conference on World Affairs at UC
Boulder in 2002. I’m putting it in this post in its entirety, but
it only touches the very surface of what he did and who he
was:

California native Lee Coldren was educated at Berkeley and at


Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He returned to
Berkeley in the late sixties to work toward a doctorate but
abandoned academia and joined the Foreign Service in 1970.

Yes, he was a Rhodes scholar, an achievement I was


simultaneously proud of and burdened by, because it was
something to aspire to and yet seemed impossible to reach. Of
course, he was at Oxford when I was still quite young (just
before the Clinton years there), and what I remember most
vividly about his stint in England was my mother baking a
German chocolate cake for his birthday, wrapping it carefully
and mailing it to him in England, but not via Air Mail. When it
arrived weeks later, it was, of course, inedible. He came home
with a slight British accent and a pipe, a pipe which rarely left
his hand or his pocket in the years since. A pipe that held the
tobacco which, when lit, created the lung acid that killed him.
A pipe that always smelled delightful to me. I still love the
smell of pipe smoke, even though I understand that it makes
mortals of the immortal now.

Lee saw my early reading achievements and always made a


point out of encouraging me by sending home books, classic
books, books kids don’t read anymore. I still have my first
edition Lord of the Rings trilogy he gave to me for my
seventh birthday. Also Robinson Crusoe in the leather-bound
edition, and The Jungle Book, similarly bound. Oh, and the

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Little Women series — all of them. Of all the books he gave


me, those were the ones I read every single year just because I
loved them so much. The first book was huge, bound as
though it were meant to last forever. For a starving Rhodes
scholar canning peaches for living money, he always
managed to send home special things for me at what I now
realize was considerable sacrifice. Never mind that I couldn’t
get through the Lord of the Rings until I was about 12. I tried
every year from the year he gave them to me, and ultimately
succeeded. He always believed I could reach farther than I
had up to then. It wasn’t a question. It was just how he saw
me.

He was a storyteller, always. Every object had a story, every


history was one worth repeating and remembering. His
stories were always interesting and quirky. He could find the
oddity in the most mundane things and bring them to life,
and his gifts always came with the story of their origin.
Whether it was a rug crafted by a child in Afghanistan or a
silver bracelet, the story was as much a part of the gift as the
gift itself.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t times where I’m certain
my mother would have preferred that he didn’t tell his
stories, or teach us some of his more irreverent, sardonic
takes on things. Like, for example, when I was booted out of
kindergarten for reciting the little childhood nursery rhyme.

“Here’s the church


Here’s the steeple
Open the door
And out come the…?”

Most children learn the end of that ditty differently than the
way he taught me. The word at the end there is usually
“people.” The one I learned was “hypocrite.” And then I
learned exactly what hypocrites are. I learned so well, in fact,
that when I showed off my newly-acquired knowledge for
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kindergarten show-and-tell at the veryveryvery strict and


pious church school I attended, they promptly threw me out.
This punishment came after I explained carefully what
hypocrites were.

I was outraged at my punishment and the injustice of being


tossed for knowing something. Wasn’t that the point?
Children don’t necessarily grok at age five that doing
something different than what you say is necessarily some
kind of moral failure and so it felt terribly, horribly unfair. An
affront not only to me, but to my uncle, who was perfect in
my eyes.

Uncle Lee could not possibly be wrong. Clearly the school was
mistaken in their judgment, and after my mother begged and
cajoled me back into the school (but not their good graces), I
learned to keep any new things I might learn to myself. I was
relieved to go to public school the following year, and never
looked back. (I’m sure my mother didn’t either.)

No matter where Lee was in the world, he always wrote


letters and we wrote to him, though not often enough. In the
dark times, I turned to him for advice and comfort and he
never failed to give it even as he admonished me to watch
over my own brother after our parents’ divorce just as my
mother had watched over him. He made me promise that I
would not let my father drive a wedge between us, to not ever
believe that I was tainted in any way by the acts and betrayals
of a father who lived a life of damaged values. I promised. I
don’t know that I delivered on the promise as well as I might
have, but I kept it because my brother was not then, nor has
he ever been, my father or at all like him. Lee the uncle
reminded me that Lee the brother was all the family I would
have someday in the distant future, and my father’s influence
was fleeting and irrelevant.

“…even roses grow in shit,” he wrote. That was one of the most
profound and simple reassurances I ever received and I never
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forgot it. Never. I’ve made my share of mistakes and missteps


in my life, but he never judged me. He would just be glad I
figured it out before I made a bigger mess.

When he came home from wherever he was in the world,


we’d break out the 7-Up and ice cream and celebrate. My
grandmother would always let me go to the airport with her
to pick him up from wherever he had been. We’d hear the
stories, edited sometimes for Grandma’s sensibilities. And
mine, of course. And it seemed as though as soon as he came
home from England, he was off to the next adventure. For the
next near-30 years, I came to understand the world through
his eyes. I knew where and what Afghanistan was when
everyone thought it was only the first word in a secret code
line from a Robert Redford movie.

Foreign Service
In retrospect, Coldren appears to have specialized in
mountainous, drug-producing ancient countries prone to
instability and terrorism. Following two years in Peru, he
worked at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from 1974-77. After
covering Sri Lanka at the Department of State and spending
two years in India, he returned to Afghanistan in 1980 to run
the embassy and cover the Russo-Afghan War. During that
time Coldren wrote several articles for Asian Survey. Escaping
South Asia in 1982, Coldren was deputy director of Korean
Affairs prior to a three-year assignment to Indonesia. As
consul general in Surabaya, Coldren focused on the politics of
traditional and radical Islamic movements in eastern
Indonesia. He then spent three years as deputy chief of
mission in Dhaka, Bangladesh before returning to Washington
in 1993.
During his last stint in Washington, Coldren was director of
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh Affairs and traveled
often to that region–especially Afghanistan–to meet with
factions and warlords. Opposing the conventional wisdom of
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the intelligence community, he predicted the rise of the


Taliban and the fall of Kabul. After years trying to get the
administration to pay positive attention to Afghanistan and
formulate a rational South Asian policy, Coldren retired to
California in 1997.
He has remained involved in Afghan affairs since retirement.
In 2000 and 2001 he participated in three UN-sponsored
Afghan brainstorming meetings involving former officials of
the U.S., USSR, Iran and Pakistan. Since 9/11, Coldren has
appeared on local radio and television stations and spent
weeks on the phone responding to journalists.

As you might imagine, Lee would have advised Mr. George W.


Bush not to start anything in Afghanistan, particularly when
he had spent so many years sending up flags for the United
States to start paying attention to the vacuum forming during
the Soviet occupation and abrupt withdrawal. Although he
never went into any detail with me about the situation in
Afghanistan over the years, I understood clearly that he
fought hard to get some official attention — any attention —
on his belief that leaving Afghanistan broken and bleeding
after the Soviets destroyed the country was going to lead to
disaster, as it ultimately did. He took no satisfaction in being
correct. After all, being right didn’t mean they acted on his
predictions. I’ve read every public thing he’s written on
Afghanistan — most is still classified — and it was there over
and over again for anyone who cared to pay attention.

There has been a lot written speculatively about his role in


the brainstorming meetings which took place in 2000 and
2001. He never talked to me about them and I never asked.
We all understood that there were topics that were simply off
limits simply because we didn’t have the clearance to hear
the answers. Still, I have always doubted the assumption that
he delivered such a message, and have a great deal of
difficulty believing he would ever have passed a message

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from Bush to the Taliban threatening them with war. He


hated war. He hated what war had done to Afghanistan, a place
with such a rich history and so full of diversity. He was
independent by then, free of government constraints, and
would have had absolutely no reason to pass on such a
message. None.

Most importantly, he could not abide Republicans, and


especially not George W. Bush. Everything that was amiss in
the world for as long as I can remember (even in the days
when I strayed and worked for Nixon in a brief episode of
teenage rebellion) was directly attributable to Republicans.
While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, and while he was
a diplomat not only professionally but also personally, no one
ever mistook him for a non-partisan type. He was a straight-
up, dyed in the wool liberal Democrat. Period. No apologies.

Uncle Lee, and people like him, are the public servants that
comprise “government.” They serve and do so honorably. He
served and did so honorably. Every time I hear some
Republican idiot go on about how they should “shrink
government” I wonder if they consider the fact that if he had
been listened to, if attention had been paid to what he was
saying by Republican and Democrat alike, perhaps thousands
of lives might have been saved. Shrinking “government”
means cutting off good people who serve their country with
words, not guns, who attend to poverty and need here and
abroad, and who in times past did not live to serve their
oligarchs. Yes, he was “government”, and he was damn good
at it too. More “government” like him, please.

Retirement

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In the years since the Colorado bio was


written, he and my aunt Mary retired to
Sacramento with their son Daryl, where
they lovingly restored their old Curtis Park
Lee and Sacramento home. I can’t possibly do
Mary, 2003 verbal justice to all the work they put in,
but they opened their home for a city tour
in 2010, and this post captures the essence
of what they created together, with their hands and their
skills. The author of that post is right: there are many, many
stories to tell.

After he retired, I got to spend a bit more time with him and
Mary in Sacramento. Trips to the Farmer’s Market, long talks,
playing with their friend’s pug, admiring Mary’s amazing art,
all woven into the fabric that brought us together more as
friends than the avuncular relationship of the past.
(Avuncular: a word he used in a letter when I was sixteen or
so, and one I had to look up at the time.) Mary’s influence
smoothed his rough edges, and their children took care of the
ones Mary didn’t get to.

Mary…an amazing person, and definitely his equal and soul


mate, which was not an easy thing. When you’re the kind of
person that consumes a lot of the room’s oxygen, your mate
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had better be prepared to live on less of it and still stand out.


That’s Mary. In the early 80s we descended upon her in her
Washington DC brownstone while Lee was in Afghanistan and
spent a week drinking wine and eating like royalty because
Mary is a world-class mother, cook, artist, animal lover, and
person. You don’t have to know her for very long to see why
they fit together so well.

Lee’s sense of family as community affected us all. He knew


our family history better than almost anyone except possibly
my grandmother. Every cousin, aunt, uncle — far and near —
he knew and had met. He drove back to South Dakota for
family reunions and drove to Wisconsin every summer with
Mary and Daryl to see Mary’s mother in Wisconsin. Along the
way he collected more stories, more memories, more history.
Whether he was in the almost-inaccessible Nuristan region in
Afghanistan’s mountains, or in the Black Hills, he was at
home among the people, their crafts, their society, and he
listened to their stories and remembered them. As one who
opposed convention, he eschewed Christmas letters in favor
of Groundhog Day letters, where we would be treated to
stories about their driving trips, home restoration, projects
and adventures. Always stories told in sardonic tones with
quirky sidelights. Always.

An extraordinary life. Public servant, diplomat, artist, artisan,


craftsman, historian, husband, son, father, brother, uncle.
These are all words that apply equally and with great weight
to tell who he was and who he touched.

My taxi driver from the airport in Detroit on Friday morning


was from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He had nine brothers and
sisters. At 2am, with empty highways ahead, he spoke of his
years in Bangladesh and how kind the people in the US
embassy were. As it turns out, he was speaking of the same
time that Lee was there — early 90s. I mentioned that my
uncle was deputy chief of mission in Dhaka around that time.
He asked his name, and I gave it. He said he couldn’t
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remember any specific person by that name, but his brothers


and sisters were servants for embassy personnel, perhaps one
of them had worked for him? Neither of us knew the answer
to that, but in the middle of the night in Detroit, a total
stranger and I had a common touchpoint because of his time
there. Remarkable. Extraordinary.

Goodbye, too soon, too suddenly


Memories, gifts, photographs.
They’re what I have — what we
have — to hold as memories of
a man who meant so much in
life. It wasn’t that there was
constant contact as much as
that he was one of those
people you could be out of
touch with for awhile and
when you saw him again, it
was like you’d seen him
yesterday. He was always
there, even when he was
thousands of miles away. You knew he was somewhere and
you knew he was thinking about you from time to time and
you knew you were as much a part of his fabric as he was
yours. You were family. No one knew that better than my
mother, who was his protector, his facilitator, his equal and
his friend. She and Mary saw him through real eyes. I saw
magic. I never came away from a visit with him without a
visceral sense that I had roots, a belonging. Stories of faraway
places I never saw but knew through his stories, photographs
and letters taught me to see the world as larger than the
small universe around me.

If a goal is to live a life without regret, I’ve failed. I regret not


getting home in time to say goodbye to him face to face, I
regret missing him when we passed through Sacramento last

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summer while he and Mary were in Wisconsin, I regret not


calling him on his birthday, I regret not knowing he was here
two weeks ago until my mother convinced him to go back
home and see a doctor because he looked so unwell. Those
are entirely my failings, but if I stop and listen, I can hear his
voice saying yes, they are failings but do better next time. I’m
sure he had regrets, too, but he never spoke of them.

All you have is your family. They’re there no matter what.

Yes, they are. Until they’re not, and yet there are still those
connected, the sons, the daughters, the friends, the
community of us who knew him.

Do better next time.

There is only this time. This short time. For Lee, 25,277 days.
A life, extraordinary, occupying 25,277 days. They pass, and
then they end, and we have memories, photographs, gifts,
stories. They’re the part that remains.

I will miss you, Lee. You are as woven into the fabric of my
being as if I were wearing a coat. I will miss you, as will we all.

Rest in peace, beloved uncle. Thank you for spending those


25,277 days making this a better, more beautiful, more
interesting, peaceful world.

Tagged on: Afghanistan, Family, government, Lee


Coldren, memorial, Sacramento, Tribute

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